You do wonder what these companies are doing or just so desperate - Sophos License Activation Policy Sophos Partner Portal
(5) Will these license changes impact your business? : sophos (reddit.com)
I had pfsense previously running on a Sophos XG 230 Rev2 unit very nicely.
I predict a lot of these units on ebay soon.
They’re nice hardware units actually, so 
They can’t make $ due to the ongoing customer support and warranty overhead costs, so they basically blackmail their existing customer base into purchasing new hardware and/or signing up for a new higher recurring extortion fee? They are headed towards bankruptcy.
Glad I run pfsense on protectli. Thanks @LTS_Tom
Thoma Bravo effect…….
Is there a list somewhere giving the hardware specs. on the different models and versions?
Just wondering if these are similar enough to servers that we could use them for things like virtualization hosts in labs.
Thanks. Looks like the XG 550, 650, and 750 are the only ones powerful enough to make decent VM hosts. But they might also get really cheap once everyone starts to see what’s happening.
Just wanted to provide small bit of clarification on the licensing. I am a Sophos partner and deploy their FWs. The licensing changes are for ‘term’ licensing not for MSP licensing. As an MSP I can activate / deactivate a FW as necessary, so licensing is month to month. Only restriction that I am aware of is at EOL where the device will no longer be supported. I can say I am not quite sure if it would be bricked at this point or would still function as a basic FW with no subscription (protection), but I wouldn’t run it that way anyhow). I am not married to Sophos but IMO it is a good solution, especially with their endpoint software, which when coupled with the FW provides ‘Synchronized Security’, which will isolate the endpoint should it become infected. I do plan at some point in near future to check out pfSense & Zorus.